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My wife of 45 years died six months ago this week. I have been processing her loss ever since. But the American Psychiatric Association now says that I have only six more months to heal myself, and that if I blow the deadline, I should be clinically defined as mentally diseased.

It’s not in my nature to use this column for personal business. But the APA’s decision to add “prolonged grief” (defined as one year or more) to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders strikes me as a ludicrous attempt to reboot natural bereavement as a disease. And once you’re diagnosed with this newly created disorder, I bet there will be meds to make it all better.

I can’t speak for other grieving souls, and, granted, I’m still a newbie. But I’ll hazard a guess that most people in similar straits fail to reorient their emotional framework within one year’s time. Heck, some people conclude their time on earth without ever finding a modicum of peace. We, the walking wounded, are grappling with life’s worst disorders, navigating at our disparate speeds. That doesn’t mean we’re “sick.”

Six months after my own heart was gutted, I seem to be an everyday functioning person. But there’s no way that I can clear the APA’s one-year hurdle. When Oct. 3, 2022 comes and goes, I’m quite sure I will meet the association’s new definition of diseased. I’ll still feel pained when I hear a song that my wife and I loved. I’ll still feel pained when I try to watch new seasons of a show that she never got to finish. I’ll still sit with a book and zone out about some shared moment 30 years past. I’ll still keep the “peasant dress” that she wore on our first New Year’s Eve. I’ll still hear echoes of her doctors talking in code (“it’s a tricky case” and “it’s a complicated case,” which meant she was doomed). At odd moments I’ll still hear her voice (“Oh, Rick?”) summoning me to her sickbed. At odd moments I’ll still feel lost in time and space.

But I won’t see any of that as illness.

I’m sure there are extreme cases of grief that do require medical treatment, but, as NYU psychiatry professor Benjamin Sadock points out, “In rare instances, prolonged grief progresses to depression, a well-recognized disorder that encompasses all of the symptoms of the ‘new’ diagnosis of prolonged grief, a disorder that is unnecessary, unwarranted, and one that may stigmatize those so diagnosed.”

Devyn Greenberg, a grad student who lost her dad to COVID writes: “It’s not just personal indignation that stirs me about the (APA’s) decision. I worry for others who have loved and lost – at some point, all of us. I worry that this framing will render us even lonelier in our pain, even more convinced that our nonlinear, unpredictable paths through loss are ‘wrong’…Many of the symptoms the psychiatric association uses to define ‘prolonged grief’ are shockingly common. ‘Intense emotional pain (e.g., anger, bitterness, sorrow)’? Let’s call that a Tuesday. ‘Identity disruption’? When you’ve walked through a portal through which you cannot return, of course your sense of self changes dramatically.”

And Martha Weinman Lear, who authored a book about loss, writes that the beneficiaries of the APA’s new diagnosis will be “pill makers.” She says: “What strikes me as abnormal is not grief beyond the APA’s one-year prescription, but the degree of chutzpah required, professional training notwithstanding, to presume to set timelines for the normal grief of others, which in fact is as various as the grievers themselves.”

The APA’s one-year deadline smacks of classic American impatience: “Get over it” and “Move on with your life.” Like the cowboy in Lonesome Dove who said, “Best thing to do with death is to ride off from it.” Um, it’s not that simple. At my six-month mark, I do feel myself “getting over it” – the worst of it anyway, but with many caveats. I do feel myself “moving on” – as best I can, but with many caveats: Is it possible to feel happy again? Is it wrong?

Bottom line: I like the Bob Dylan line, “he not busy being born is busy dying.” What you do is, you learn to live with the emotional pain. Then you cushion it with all the joy you can muster for the good things in your life – be they family, friends (old and new), work, travel, biking, hiking, whatever – because you realize that gratitude can be a powerful palliative. You accept melancholia and whenever possible you lighten it with mirth. You honor your loss and accept the fact that your old life, and all the ways your loved one enhanced it, is irrevocably over – and that it’s now incumbent to craft a new one.

Sorry, headshrinkers. I won’t need meds for that.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

If or when Merrick Garland bestirs himself to action, he’d do well to ponder the new federal court ruling that drops the hammer on coup conspirator John Eastman.

On Monday, the case for indicting Donald Trump was succinctly framed and arguably wrapped in a bow. And this was without even knowing what Trump may have said to fellow conspirators during seven key hours on Insurrection Day, the 7 hours and 37 minutes that are mysteriously missing from the White House phone logs.

Seriously, folks. What is it gonna take?

First, some quick housekeeping: Eastman, you may recall, is the Better-Call-Saul lawyer who’s been outed for concocting a “legal” memo that was designed to help Trump overturn his election loss. Sort of a fascist instructional sheet for dummies.

Monday’s court ruling, authored by U.S. District Judge David Carter (a former decorated Marine), commanded Eastman to cough up 101 emails – mostly exchanges with Trump – and to share them with the House’s Jan. 6 Committee. That was the narrow issue at hand. But, fortunately, Carter took it upon himself to connect the dots that situate Trump at the center of the blessedly failed coup. Carter’s warning was an implicit plea for Merrick Garland to wake up:

“If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.”

It would seem that our accountability sleuths at the Justice Department still need to be enlightened about the evidence that shines with the strength of 100 suns. Whatcha got for us, Judge Carter?

“Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history…Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower – it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.”

As Judge Carter reminds us, Eastman insisted in his Jan. 3, 2021 memo that Mike Pence, during his ceremonial task of counting the Electoral College votes, could simply throw out seven Biden states, thus reducing the tally to 232-222; and that Pence could then announce that since no candidate had reached the magic 270, the election would decided by the House, where each state would get one vote – and since the GOP at that time controlled 26 of the 50 state delegations, presto! Trump would win the election.

The problem, of course, was that Pence had no power to toss Electoral College votes, because there’s no such provision in the Constitution. But that mattered not a whit to Trump, who spent days trying to muscle Pence into executing the plan that Eastman had touted as “BOLD.”

The judge zeroed in on one particular provision of the federal criminal code – 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) – which, as he explained, “criminalizes obstruction or attempted obstruction of an official proceeding. It requires three elements: (1) the person obstructed, influenced or impeded, or attempted to obstruct, influence or impede (2) an official proceeding of the United States, and (3) did so corruptly.” He thus concluded:

“Because President Trump likely knew that the plan to disrupt the electoral count was wrongful, his mindset exceeds the threshold for acting ‘corruptly.’…After filing and losing more than 60 suits (in court), this plan was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means.”

The potential hitch in all this evidence is that to prove Trump’s criminality to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors need to successfully argue that Trump knew in his mind that his coup conspiracy was wrong. Hence the potential problem: This mope doesn’t have a moral compass. He tends to believe that whatever he wants or says at any given moment is right and true.

For instance, one possible explanation for the seven-hour gap in the White House phone logs is that Trump communicated with fellow conspirators by using burner phones. In a statement, he denied doing that because, he insisted, “I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term.”

I’m sure he believes that lie in his mind. The problem is, he used the term “burner phones” at least three times in his recent lawsuit against niece Mary Trump. And former national security adviser John Bolton told CBS News, “Wait a minute, Trump knows burner phones.”

The Jan. 6 Committee members have been calling on the Justice Department “to do its job,” but alas it’s possible that Garland is hesitating to indict Trump precisely because it’s so hard to prove that someone so amoral has any consciousness of wrongdoing. Heck, just this week Trump asked his 2016 campaign ally, war criminal Vladimir Putin, to release some dirt on Hunter Biden.

I know, I know. Just like you, I’m rolling my eyes. Again.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

When I hear Republicans blaming President Biden for high gas prices, I’m reminded of what scribe Mary McCarthy once said of her rival Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

I wouldn’t go quite that far in condemning Republicans for their current propaganda. But aside from those two little words, they’ve been weaving a panoply of lies that would make Putin envious.

The propaganda about gas prices – “Joe Biden caused this and doesn’t seem to care,” bleats the Republican National Committee – is all about hoodwinking voters in advance of the November midterm elections, a neat trick designed to turn the House and Senate red.

But it may well work like a charm, because for the average citizen swallowing lies is a lot easier than fact-checking. Besides, it’s always easiest to lash out at the incumbent party. As Senator Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said the other day, “Historically, people automatically blame presidents for (high) gas prices.”

So it’s may well be a waste of time for me to parse the GOP’s BS, but hey, refuting lies is an old habit of mine, regardless of whether any gullible voter may happen to read this.

For instance, Republicans on Capitol Hill are falsely contending that the current gas price spike is all Biden’s fault because he’s not letting the oil companies do enough drilling. Senator Bill Cassidy says Biden has launched “an all-out assault on the development of U.S. oil.” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tweets that gas price spikes are “what happens when you destroy America’s energy industry.”

But the truth – for what it’s worth – is that oil barrel production has actually increased since Biden became president, as have the number of oil rigs. There are also roughly 9,000 wells that have been federally-approved, but have not yet been drilled because key oil companies, flush with recent profits, have decided to instead return cash to their shareholders.

It’s the drillers – not Biden – who have been holding back.

In truth, Biden has been so oil-friendly that environmentalists and climate change experts have become demoralized. Contrary to the Republican lie that Biden has killed domestic energy production, the truth is quite the opposite.

“Biden has done nothing to halt oil leasing. In fact, the Biden administration has outpaced Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands and water in its first year,” according to federal data analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Here’s another metric: According to the conservation group Center for Western Priorities, the Biden administration approved more drilling permits during his first year in office than Trump did in any of his first three.

My favorite Republican lie, however, is how the current gas price spike wouldn’t be happening if only Biden hadn’t “killed” the Keystone XL pipeline that was gonna bring crude oil from Canada.

Biden indeed canceled it, but the pipeline was never “operating” in the first place. At the time Biden canceled it, only eight percent of it had been built – and the original target date for completion, barring all holdups and court battles, would’ve been 2023 at the absolute earliest. Besides, we currently get lots of Canadian crude oil anyway. It arrives by rail.

But that’s all nuance, whereas the Republicans are masters of lying simplicity. As Joseph Goebbels infamously said, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Indeed, Republicans are reportedly selling stickers that motorists can slap on gas pumps, with Biden pointing and saying “I did that.”

Will their lies snow enough voters to triumph in November?

I’ll answer that with a question: Have you lived in America lately?

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

During World War II, Americans put up with rationed gas and car tires, rationed coal and fuel oil, rationed silk and nylon, rationed meat and daily products, rationed jams and jellies, even rationed coffee.

Would today’s Americans – some of whom freaked out, during the worst of the pandemic, when they couldn’t get their hair done – be willing to endure even a minuscule fraction of the sacrifices that our forebears weathered 80 years ago? I’ll answer my own question with a question: Can you imagine what would happen if coffee were rationed, and people could no longer order their favorite cafe lattes?

I pondered all that while watching President Biden deliver his State of the Union speech. He vowed on our behalf, and for the preeminent cause of democracy, to stick it to the murderous Russian thug for as along as it takes. Ukraine is fighting for its life on the front line of freedom, and, as our commander in chief said, we need to show our “resolve.”

He stressed that word many times.

We meet tonight as Americans, “with an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” And “American resolve matters.” And “(Putin) will never weaken the resolve of the free world.” And this: “Now is the hour. Our moment of responsibility. Our test of resolve and conscience, of history itself.”

We’ll see if his fellow citizens are willing to pass that test, because it would appear that most are not willing to follow his lead. Only 37 percent say he’s doing a good job (which seems insanely low, given the 65 percent fully-vaccinated rate and the four percent unemployment rate and the six million new jobs and the signing of his historic infrastructure repair law – but hey, what do I know).

People are “tired, frustrated, and exhausted” (Biden’s words) after two years of lockdowns and masks, inflation has spiked, and now they’re being asked to hunker down a bit for more sacrifice, on behalf of a country that millions couldn’t locate on a map unless their hands were duct-taped to the correct coordinates.

This is especially true among younger Americans – who, by the luck of birth, did not experience the Cold War and barely know what it was. According to a new ABC News-Washington Post poll, only 35 percent of those aged 18 to 39 would still support sanctioning Russia if it resulted in higher energy prices at home. Indeed, only half of all Americans would still be on board. It just so happens that in our interconnected world, Russia is the third biggest producer of crude oil. And, politically speaking, woe to any president who makes it more costly to fill the sainted internal combustion engine.

Biden is releasing 30 million barrels from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to “help blunt gas prices here at home,” as permitted under federal law (a 30-million barrel release can be ordered in the event of “a domestic or international energy supply shortage of significant scope or duration.”) And yeah, that could help – maybe for awhile. But mostly he tried to mollify Americans by doing his best impression of a kindly doctor who still makes house calls, dropping his voice to a reassuring semi-whisper while telling Americans, “We are going to be okay.”

It was some consolation that Biden’s Ukraine remarks drew actual bipartisan applause. There is indeed a market for high principle, as former Republican pollster Matthew Dowd wrote: “In our country and in the world, the forces of autocracy are rising in the most significant way since World War II, and democracies are in danger of suffering tragic harms, if history is any predictor. This is why the fight in Ukraine is important to us all.”

True that. For many Americans, particularly those born after the Cold War, the fight for freedom was an abstraction. Putin has made it very real.

So here’s a handy tip for any American who gets whiny about pain at the gas pump: Just be thankful you’re not huddled with your family in some basement while killers detonate thermobaric vacuum bombs that suck oxygen out of the air. That’s real pain.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

I’m old enough to remember when rabid rightist Republicans proclaimed “Better Dead Than Red” and insisted that anyone who was “soft” on Russia should leave this country and go live over there.

I never imagined, back when they paraded themselves as America’s true patriots, that they’d ever pull the ultimate switcheroo and morph from patriots to appeasers.

But hey, you live long enough and I suppose anything is possible. Now they’re scorning an American president in time of war, while sending love and kisses to a murderous Russian imperialist. As veteran political analyst Stuart Rothenberg sardonically noted on Twitter, “And you thought Republicans might rally around a sitting president during an international crisis, when the U.S. and our allied need to be unified. Not a chance.”

Of course not, because Vladimir Putin’s western branch manager – who sets the tone for the GOP – just won Employee of the Month for the umpteenth time. Trump praised Putin as “savvy” and “a genius,” in contrast to the president “who shouldn’t be there (and) has no concept of what he’s doing.” When Trump watched Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine on TV, his reaction was: “This is genius. Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine…as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper.”

A peacekeeper. It’s like the Kremlin is broadcasting propaganda to Trump via the fillings in his teeth. And his mouth dutifully keeps moving: “(Putin) liked me. I liked him…Got a lot of the great charm and a lot of pride. But the way he – and he loves his country, you know? He loves his country.”

We’re also saddled with Mike Pompeo, a Republican presidential aspirant and the only former Secretary of State who’s out there calling Putin “savvy.” Just so you know, the Oxford English Dictionary defines savvy as “having common sense and good judgment.”

But in the Orwellian world of MAGA, “good judgment” is defined as flexing military muscle against a sovereign nation that’s trying to transition to democracy. MAGA Senator Josh Hawley, one of the pro-insurrectionists on Jan. 6, recently offered his definition of bad judgment: “global, multilateral cooperation, underwritten by American military might.” Putin couldn’t have said it better.

Alexander Vindman, former staff member of the National Security Council, singled out Hawley and other appeasers in a tweet the other day: “These people and a great deal of the GOP leadership will have blood on their hands. They’re fanning flames, encouraging Putin to attack Ukraine.”

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, shakes his head in wonderment: “When I was a little by, both Republicans and Democrats believed that democracy was good and the Soviet Union was bad. Now I’m an old fart and Republicans believe Russia is good and democracy is bad.” I feel you, Joe. Back when I was a little boy in 1962, and a Democratic president had to confront the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Republicans didn’t try to undercut their commander-in-chief.”

But times have changed. The official House Republican Twitter feed posted a photo of President Biden and messaged: “This is what weakness on the world stage looks like.” That tweet puzzled me. I was not under the impression that rallying the western alliance and slapping economic sanctions on the aggressor meets the dictionary definition of weakness.

It would nice to believe that the GOP’s MAGA wing will sink the party in the 2022 and 2024 elections. It would be nice to believe that most Americans will recoil at this perfidious – and potentially traitorous – behavior. But rest assured that Duh Base at this point will swallow whatever bilge it is offered.

And as for a broader swath of Americans, their concerns are frankly quite parochial: As long as a lot of Americans aren’t being killed faraway, a foreign crisis is at most a mere annoyance. And if that foreign crisis does trigger discomfort on the home front – like, in the present case, higher gas prices and more inflation (Biden warned that defending Ukraine’s freedom “will have costs for us as well”) – rest assured that people will take out their frustrations on him, further crashing his poll ratings in the run up to 2024.

The GOP appeasers want that. Putin wants that. It’s a new shared definition of savvy.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

We who abhor gun violence and loathe gun merchants have been dreaming of the day when a few aggrieved parties pull off a miracle and gain a small measure of justice.

So it was sweet this week to learn that nine families devastated by the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012 had extracted a $73 million settlement from Remington Arms, the company that had manufactured and hyped the Bushmaster AR-15 that enabled some loser to decimate 20 little kids and six grownups with 154 bullets in a span of 264 seconds.

The settlement, after more than five years of litigation in the Connecticut courts, is downright historic. There are no guarantees that such justice can be replicated in other mass shootings, for reasons I will explain, but a moment of celebration is certainly warranted.

To this day, I can’t bear to look at pictures of those Sandy Hook kids, but that’s just me. The Senate Republicans who stonewalled gun reform after the massacre were apparently less moved. So was Remington Arms, which fought the Sandy Hook lawsuit tooth and nail for years. Their predictable instinct was to defend their Bushmaster ad campaign – the one it featured in civilian catalogues with slogans like these:

The uncompromising choice when you demand a rifle as mission-adaptable as you are…

Military-proven performance…

The ultimate combat weapons system…

Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered…

Consider your man card reissued…

Remington believed the Sandy Hook parents had no power to sue and that they had total immunity from lawsuits thanks to a 2005 federal law, pushed by the NRA, that blessed Big Gun with blanket protection. What a great deal it was and continues to be, courtesy of President Bush (who signed it) and the Republicans in Congress (along with help from some Democrats, like Bernie Sanders). The law is creatively named “The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.”

Well, those little kids in Connecticut – those so-called “forces of opposition” – were indeed “single-handedly outnumbered.” But the good news is that the parents found a loophole. The federal act said it was still OK to sue gunmakers for “knowingly” violating state laws that address the “sale or marketing” of a firearm.

And it just so happens that Connecticut has an Unfair Trade Practices Act, which bars deceptive and unfair conduct of trade or commerce. Under that state law, a commercial practice is deemed unfair if it is “immoral, unethical, oppressive, or unscrupulous.” Turns out, according to the Connecticut courts that handled the Sandy Hook lawsuit, that selling “mission adaptable” military hardware to civilians for offensive (pun intended) combat purposes indeed met the definition of immoral and unethical.

So Remington decided to throw in the towel and settle (without formally admitting any guilt, naturally). Or, to be more precise, Remington’s insurers are paying the $73-million tab because Remington as an entity went bankrupt a few years ago. Legal niceties aside, it’s the first time that an American merchant of death has ever been held accountable.

The big question is whether this is the dawn of a new day for the families of mass shooting victims – or a rarity. Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and gun policy specialist, said this week in an Axios broadcast: “This settlement is going to encourage more lawsuits…The kinds of advertising that were used by Remington in this case were not unique to that company. Many of the gunmakers have marketed these AR-15 style military assault rifles in ways that emphasize combat violence, and appeal to the kind of hyper-masculinity that the families accused Remington of doing.”

But the 2005 federal immunity law will still be a huge hurdle for aggrieved families elsewhere, especially in states that have weak unfair trade laws – or no such laws at all. State courts may be less amenable than the Connecticut courts. And ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court has the final word on gun rights, and we’re all familiar with its ideological composition. The 6-3 right-wing majority can’t touch the Remington settlement, but it takes little imagination to guess how it would rule if a similar lawsuit crossed its radar. Besides, the gunmakers can always devise new ways to advertise their deadly goods so as not to run afoul of other states’ laws.

Nevertheless, if the settlement in Connecticut makes it even a wee bit harder for some loser somewhere to attain his “man card,” then perhaps some innocent lives will be saved. As Joseph Marshall III, a Native-American historian, has wisely remarked, “Success is rarely the result of one swell swoop, but more often the culmination of many, many small victories.”

On the gun violence front, may we celebrate many more.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

At this point in our sick national saga, is there any law that Trump hasn’t broken?

A federal statute on the books – Title 18, Section 2071 of the U.S. Code – spells out the provisions of the Presidential Records Act of 1978. All materials generated by a president, in the furtherance of his (or her) official duties, automatically belong to the American people. Which means that all such materials – documents, memos, gifts, letters, whatever – must be transferred to the National Archives upon that president’s departure from office.

The law also warns that anyone found guilty of “willfully and unlawfully” concealing, removing, mutilating, obliterating, or destroying, or attempting to do any such action, can be fined and imprisoned for up to three years.

As David Ferriero, the official Archivist of the United States, stated this week, “The Presidential Records Act is critical to our democracy, in which the government is held accountable by the people. Whether through the creation of adequate and proper documentation, sound records management practices, the preservation of records, or the timely transfer of them to the National Archives at the end of an administration, there should be no question as to need for both diligence and vigilance. Records matter.”

Why, pray tell, did Ferriero feel compelled to issue such a statement? Only because the Visigoth of Mar a Lago had been caught, yet again, pillaging the spirit of democracy. Because, as we’ve now learned, it took the National Archives a full year (from January 2021 to January 2022) to retrieve 15 boxes of our stuff – including potential security-sensitive material – that Trump stole from the White House while being shoved out the door by a record-high 81 million voters.

Granted, other presidents have done bad things. Bill and Hillary took some gifts and furnishings that belonged to the White House that they were compelled to return. But the sheer scale of Trump’s pilferage has reportedly dwarfed all previous episodes.

Of course, considering everything else Trump has done and continues to do, stealing 15 boxes in breach of federal law is roughly the equivalent of jaywalking. This grifter hid his tax returns and his medical records, so why should we care that he spent a full year hiding government documents?

That’s how far he has lowered the bar – he gets away with everything (so far) because nobody expects him to do any better. But just imagine how the right-wing infauxtainment complex would’ve reacted if Barack Obama had stolen 15 boxes and secreted them in his manse on Martha’s Vineyard. Tucker Carlson’s head would’ve detonated with the power of a hundred suns.

We average citizens know full well that ignorance of the law, or blithe indifference to the law, is no defense. If a cop stops us for going 60 in a 45-mph zone, he’s not impressed if we claim that we didn’t see the speed signs. He’d be doubly unimpressed if we were to admit that we did see the signs, but paid them no mind.

But in Trump’s case, there’s a different metric. It boils down to this: Give him a pass, because he doesn’t know any better.

This week, Trump advisers told the press that, with respect to those 15 stolen boxes, Dear Leader had no “nefarious intent,” no “criminal intent.” They said that he simply didn’t make any distinction between how he operated in the public sector and how he had always operated in the private sector.

As one ex-Trump official reportedly insisted: “I don’t think he did this out of malicious intent to avoid complying with the Presidential Records Act. As long as he’s been in business, he’s been very transactional and it was probably his longtime practice and I don’t think his habits changed when he got to the White House.”

Oh.

Did no staffer enlighten him that working as president is different from running a casino? Was he indeed briefed about the Presidential Record Act, but shrugged it off? Is that why some of the material turned over to the National Archives arrived there in torn-up pieces?

We can certainly ask such questions, but don’t hold your breath waiting for answers.

One final question:

Are there more boxes secreted somewhere at Mar a Lago?

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

When word spread last week about an imminent Supreme Court retirement, I hoped against hope that it would be Clarence Thomas.

No such luck.

Replacing Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer with a Biden appointee is really no biggie. Ridding the court of Clarence, and his blatant conflicts of interest, would be a major upgrade – at least in terms of repairing the court’s record-low reputation. Because for more than 20 years it has been an open secret, and a patent disgrace, that wife Ginni has been a right-wing activist working on a range of hot button issues on which hubby sits in judgement.

Perhaps it’s sheer coincidence that he was the lone dissenter in the 8-1 ruling that bars Donald Trump from blocking the release of documents about the Jan. 6 insurrection – the same event that Ginni agitated for on Facebook, the same event to which she helped send busloads of insurrectionists. At the very least, it sure looks bad. In fact, the official Code of Judicial Conduct, embedded in federal law, specifically states that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judges of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned” by a reasonable, objective person.

Yup, the code says “any justice.” Problem is, the Supremes exempt themselves from the code.

There are no Supreme Court rules governing conflict of interest. The justices police themselves, which of course means that, in practice, they don’t police themselves at all. All other federal judges in all the lower courts are inhibited from putting themselves in any situation that might convey an appearance of impropriety. But not the nine folks at the top of the pyramid.

That’s long been a great deal for Clarence and Ginni. As far back as December 2000, while the high court was weighing whether to stop the Florida recount and award the White House to George W. Bush (which it did, with Clarence voting in the 5-4 majority), Ginny, as a staffer at the conservative Heritage Foundation, was already screening resumes for the incoming Bush administration. A decade later, Clarence sat in judgement of Obamacare while Ginni was earning roughly $165,000 working for several groups that lobbied to repeal Obamacare. During the Trump administration, Ginni worked closely with (and was paid by) a prominent anti-immigrant activist who filed amicus briefs defending Trump’s Muslim travel ban – while Clarence was hearing cases about the travel ban.

The conflict of interest episodes are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that Clarence steadfastly refused to recuse himself, despite repeated demands over the years that he do so. It’s a blatant breach of judicial ethics – and the all-important perception of impartial justice – that he’s still on the bench when gay rights cases get debated (Ginni is on record railing against “transsexual fascists”), and when national security cases get weighed (Ginni is on record railing against “the Deep State”).

Last year, a bipartisan coalition of 107 law professors from 76 law schools asked Congress to require that all federal judges with perceived conflicts at least explain in writing the reasons why they’d refused to recuse themselves. A tepid reform, for sure. But right now Clarence doesn’t have to explain anything.

The only available constitutional remedy is for the House to target the guy with an impeachment probe. Democrats, who run the Judiciary Committee, could subpoena Ginni and ask pointed questions about her actions on behalf of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. With that matter under investigation, Clarence might actually be compelled to recuse himself on all Jan. 6-related cases. But alas, as we all well know, hand-wringing Democrats shrink from that kind of hardball.

So I suppose there’s only one solution. President Biden, having pledged to replace Breyer with a well-qualified Black woman, should simply announce that his choice is Anita Hill. Having long survived Clarence Thomas’ sexual harassment, the attorney and law professor is rested and ready.

Perhaps forcing Clarence to share the bench with Hill would be sufficient impetus for him to quit.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Seventy years ago, in response to a fantastical-but-true event on the ball field, sportswriter Red Smith wrote: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.”

Indeed there are times, as we all know, when life imitates art imitates life. But this week nothing can top the twisty absurdism of the true tale that bonds Larry David with his ex-TV wife and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s a tale I find worth telling, if only because I yearn not to write today about the usual downers, like encroaching fascism and Russian troop movements.

Nevertheless, if you do want some downer material, stay tuned. Because I can offer you Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

For those of you who haven’t seen the 11 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” here’s the gist: Seinfeld creator Larry David, playing a curmudgeonly character named Larry David, is relentlessly punished, in big and small ways, for his various meddlings, inactions, and passive aggressive actions. The Jerusalem Post newspaper approvingly points out, “Curb Your Enthusiasm has always been a Jewy show,” operating on the Yiddish principle middah k’neged middah – which roughly translates to “what goes around comes around.” As our star would say, he gets “prit-tayy…prit-ayy” pissed.

Jewish themes and tropes predominate, moreso than ever. Larry, as “Larry,” detests Trumpists and anti-Semites, and he’s obsessed with the Holocaust. This past season, when a Klansman comes to his house, ticked off that Larry’s friend Susie had sewn a Star of David on his Klan robe, Larry alerts the neighborhood by blowing the Rosh Hashanah shofar from his balcony. That’s all consistent with some of the stuff he produced on “Seinfeld,” like the episode when Jerry and George got stuck in a limo with two Nazis who said the Holocaust was a hoax.

Anyway, in our real-life Curb episode, real Larry and the real actress Cheryl Hines, who was pretend-married to “Larry” on the show until they pretend-divorced, were both guests at a real wedding in 2012. At that wedding, Larry introduced Cheryl to another guest, RFK Jr. (one of the slain RFK’s 11 children). The two hit off. Cheryl nicknamed him “my Cutie Booby Bobby.” They got hitched in 2014.

Fast forward to last Sunday, when people who refuse to get vaccinated – people dedicated to the further spread of the virus and its variants – gathered for a rally in Washington. RFK Jr. was a prominent speaker. Suffice it to say, statistically speaking, that in a family of 11 children, there was bound to be at least one nutcase. Precisely the kind that makes Larry’s head spin.

This particular Kennedy is part of the crowd that somehow equates vaccine mandates (that are designed to save people’s lives) with Nazis (whose Holocaust snuffed six million lives).

On Sunday, Kennedy posited the notion that in today’s America, we’re all worse off than Anne Frank. The vaxxers, he said, are using satellites and 5G mobile networks to create a massive surveillance network that will ferret out anyone refusing to get vaxxed. In his words, “None of us can run and none of us can hide…Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did.”

Well. I suspect that Anne Frank’s family could’ve enlighten Kennedy about a few things, had they not all died in Nazi camps. As the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted yesterday, exploiting the deaths of people who perished in the Nazi epidemic “is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay.”

One can only imagine what’ll happen with Larry and Cheryl meet on the set for season 12:

“Hi Larry, I hope you’re not mad at me because of Cutie Booby.”

“Eh.”

“Because, remember, you’re the one who introduced us.”

“Eh.”

“Fine. What’s our first scene?”

“Forget it, Eva Braun. You are prit-tayy…prit-tayy…fired.”

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

In conversation this week with the White House press corps, on the eve of his one-year presidential anniversary, Joe Biden said: “One thing I haven’t been able to do so far is get my Republican friends to get in the game of making things better in this country… I did not anticipate that there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.”

How could he not have “anticipated” such sabotage? We all knew it would happen. Did he really think he would be spared what happened to Barack Obama? And by the way, they’re not his “friends.” They’ve metastasized into a cult movement bent on destroying not only his presidency, but two centuries of democracy.

Not that untold millions of semi-attentive voters seem to care. Gallup reports that the Republicans have gained adherents during Biden’s tenure, and now hold a five-point national advantage in party preference.

Fairly or not, voters generally have a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude, and if things are going bad (omicron, inflation), they tend to blame whoever is in charge. The plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face-fact that Republicans are enthralled by the big lie of a stolen election, that they’re determined to stage a coup next time by every possible means, and that they’re sabotaging Biden because they think he’s illegitimate, is apparently too much nuance for too many Americans. Indeed, only 32 percent believe that the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol was an insurrection or attempted coup.

Granted, Biden has made mistakes. His Afghanistan withdrawal was arguably too precipitous. His massive Build Back Better Act and his voting rights bills were too ambitious for a 50-50 Senate. His goal of working on passage with “Republican friends” always seemed naive. Yes, the destructive behavior of Democrats Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema – standing tall for the GOP’s exploitation of the filibuster – has killed the federal voting rights bills, but their treachery is pivotal only because all 50 Republican senators voted to essentially ratify the slow-motion subversion of nonpartisan election machinery that’s happening right now in Republican-controlled states.

Why should Biden shoulder prime blame for the omicron variant? Viruses mutate when they’re not adequately snuffed, and Republicans (only 59 percent of whom are vaccinated) have done their best to thwart vaccination mandates. Is it Biden’s fault that Fox News pumps anti-vax sludge every day into the heads of its credulous viewers?

Does Biden deserve prime blame for the current inflation and supply chain glitches – which have been greatly exacerbated by the global pandemic that he didn’t cause? At the very least, when judging his first-year performance, the books should be somewhat balanced by the fact that the economy has been heating up, that the jobless rate has fallen to 3.9 percent (far faster than projected; at one point during Trump’s final year, it was 14.7 percent) and that on Biden’s watch 6.4 million jobs have been created – more than triple the average job growth from 2015 to 2019. It should be obvious that this economic resurgence has fueled in part by the successful vaccination – in less than a year, full vaccination – of roughly 210 million people.

What can Biden do to recoup lost ground in the polls? Since working with the Republicans is a fantasy best forgotten, he has no choice but to tout more clearly what he has already achieved (the long-overdue infrastructure package and the economic relief package), what he’s doing this year to battle the pandemic (free testing kits on an easy website; free N95 masks), what he’s doing to fight inflation (he’s already clearing up port bottlenecks), and how he’s planning, realistically, to pass ambitious legislation in smaller chunks (early child care, for instance).

It’s premature to pronounce his presidency dead – Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had terrible job approval ratings during their first terms, but won re-election handily – but he’ll need to leverage the current polarization to his advantage, and persuade enough voters that he’s on their side while the Republicans are…what exactly?

“Think about this,” he said yesterday. “What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name one thing they’re for.”

That’s easy: Brute power at the expense of our teetering democracy. But the big question, going forward, is whether enough voters give a hoot.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]